She was retired. A phone call from a private equity partner changed that. The condition: move the headquarters from San Francisco to Minneapolis. They said yes. What followed was a two-year sprint that doubled revenue, added 230 employees, and landed Perforce on the map as a Fortune 500 staple.
The phone rang in 2015, and Janet Dryer - recently retired after 30 years in the software industry - picked it up. On the other end was Peter Rottier, a managing partner at Summit Partners, the growth equity firm that had backed HelpSystems during her tenure there. He had a small, San Francisco-based company called Perforce Software that needed a leader. She had a condition: move the headquarters to Minneapolis. He agreed. She came out of retirement.
That negotiation tells you almost everything about how Janet Dryer operates. She doesn't take jobs; she sets terms. She'd spent the previous 16 years building HelpSystems from a $20 million revenue business to $110 million, starting as one of the company's first three employees back in 1985 - when she took a sales job straight out of the College of Saint Benedict. By the time she handed the CEO title at HelpSystems to a successor in 2015, the company had nearly tripled its headcount to 300 people and was moving into private equity hands.
"I agreed to come out of retirement, but only if the company headquarters would be relocated to Minneapolis."
- Janet Dryer, on joining Perforce Software as CEO in 2016Perforce, at the time of her arrival in January 2016, was a version control company - the kind of infrastructure software that large engineering teams depend on but most people outside the industry have never heard of. Its flagship product, Helix Core, is used by developers managing enormous codebases: aerospace firms, game studios, automotive manufacturers, financial services giants. The company needed what Janet knew how to build: scale, culture, and a sales engine.
What she proceeded to do over the next two and a half years is the kind of run that private equity firms write case studies about. She grew the company from roughly 220 employees to 450 globally. Revenue doubled to $150 million. Perforce expanded its customer footprint to 80 countries, with more than half the Fortune 500 using its products. She orchestrated six acquisitions in three years - extending Perforce's product portfolio from version control into automated testing, static analysis, application lifecycle management, and beyond.
The Star Tribune called her one of the drivers of Minnesota's robust technology economy. The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal named her a 2017 Titan of Technology - a recognition reserved for executives making measurable structural impact on the region's tech sector. And the company she was building - under the banner of Summit Partners, then Clearlake Capital - was earning back-to-back Top Workplaces designations from the Star Tribune. Two companies, two different PE-backed environments, and two Top Workplaces rankings. That's not a coincidence.
The detail that most people who know Janet Dryer mention first is what she did when HelpSystems was sold. When the deal closed and the proceeds were being distributed, Dryer voluntarily surrendered a portion of her own equity payout. She then persuaded Summit Partners to take additional funds from the deal proceeds and distribute them to HelpSystems employees who had no stock options - people who had no contractual claim on the exit windfall, but who had contributed to building what was being sold. It was her initiative. It didn't have to happen. She made it happen.
That decision distills her philosophy about the relationship between leadership and the people who build the company. She operates on the premise that culture isn't a HR program - it's a set of commitments that get tested hardest at moments of leverage, like an exit. At Perforce, she applied the same logic: connection at every level of the organization, transparency about company direction, and genuine recognition of contribution. The results showed up in the workplace surveys and in retention numbers.
Her educational roots at the College of Saint Benedict - a Catholic liberal arts women's college in central Minnesota, where she graduated in 1983 with a degree in business administration - formed a foundation she still references. The Benedictine values that shape CSB's culture: hospitality, community, service. She and her husband have been actively involved in educational philanthropy, including support for Cristo Rey Jesuit, a school designed to serve first-generation college-bound students.
Perforce Software makes the tools that engineering teams at scale depend on. Helix Core - its version control platform - handles what Git can't: codebases measured in terabytes, binary assets like game art and automotive simulation data, environments where thousands of developers work on a single codebase simultaneously. Its customers include aerospace and defense contractors, AAA game studios, automotive manufacturers running embedded software programs, and financial institutions where every code change has compliance implications.
When Dryer arrived, Perforce was a solid niche player. When she stepped aside in June 2018 - transitioning to Chair of the Board as Mark Ties took the CEO role following Clearlake Capital's acquisition - it was a platform company. The acquisitions she orchestrated during her tenure brought in testing tools, ALM products, static analysis capabilities, and digital asset management. The thesis was consolidation: give DevOps teams a suite of connected tools instead of a single point solution.
The move to Minneapolis was both symbolic and strategic. Minnesota has a deep bench of enterprise software talent - decades of companies like HelpSystems, SPS Commerce, Digi International, and others have built a workforce fluent in B2B SaaS and enterprise sales. Perforce's San Francisco roots gave it credibility on the coasts; its Minneapolis address gave it access to talent that wasn't being poached daily by consumer tech firms. It was a bet that paid off.
In June 2018, when Clearlake Capital completed its acquisition of Perforce, Dryer handed the CEO title to Mark Ties and moved into the Chair of the Board role. It was the second time she'd orchestrated a clean handoff at a company she'd built - the kind of transition that preserves institutional knowledge while bringing in new operational energy. Both times, the companies she left were meaningfully larger, more stable, and more culturally coherent than when she arrived.
The career arc is unusual: 30 years in the same regional software ecosystem, two companies scaled from sub-$25M to nine-figure revenue, two private equity cycles completed successfully, and a reputation built on a particular kind of operating philosophy that's easier to describe by its actions than its abstractions. She shared the exit with employees who had no legal claim on it. She moved a company from San Francisco to Minneapolis because she believed in the market. She came out of retirement because she saw something worth building.
Perforce continues to grow - it has gone through further acquisitions and capital raises since her tenure, with the company's total known funding exceeding $137 million and the product portfolio expanding further into DevOps, compliance, and digital asset management. The infrastructure she built - the culture, the geographic bet, the acquisition strategy, the sales motion - is still in service.
The College of Saint Benedict gave her an Entrepreneur of the Year award in 2015. The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal called her a Titan of Technology in 2017. Neither of those honors capture the specific thing she actually built: a repeatable playbook for growing enterprise software companies in the Midwest, without losing the people who made them worth growing.
When HelpSystems was sold, Dryer did something almost no one does: she gave up her own equity to make sure employees without stock options walked away with something. She persuaded Summit Partners to distribute additional proceeds to non-equity staff. It wasn't required. She made it happen anyway.
Perforce was a San Francisco company. Dryer knew where the talent was. Her non-negotiable condition for taking the CEO role - move the headquarters to Minneapolis - was also a thesis about where the company should be built. The bet paid off: Perforce earned two consecutive Star Tribune Top Workplaces rankings.
Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal - awarded to executives making measurable structural impact on the region's technology sector.
College of Saint Benedict - awarded to alumni making exceptional contributions to business and their communities.
Janet joined HelpSystems in 1985 as one of the company's original three employees - starting as a sales representative and spending three decades growing alongside the business before running it.
When Summit Partners came calling about Perforce, she agreed on one non-negotiable: the San Francisco company had to relocate its headquarters to Minneapolis. They said yes. The rest is growth history.
When HelpSystems was sold, Dryer voluntarily gave up personal exit proceeds and persuaded Summit Partners to distribute funds to employees who had no stock options - a move almost no executive makes at a PE exit.